Community Music Center
544 Capp Street SF
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14th Annual Outsound New Music Summit
Quiet Noise(the art of sculpting sound from metal, wood, and earth)
Tickets for 14th Annual Outsound New Music Summit

Machine Shop: A Live Amplified Gong Experience
Karen Stackpole: Gongs
Drew Webster: Live Mixing, Analog Effects Processing and Electronics
Cheryl Leonard natural-object instruments, Japanese bowl gongs, field recordings


Machine Shop: Live Amplified Gong Experience
Gongs. The original heavy metal. Now amplified for your pleasure. Machine Shop is a gong and electronics duo blazing new paths in sound and music. Constantly exploring the outer reaches of sonic possibilities and evolving, Machine Shop is about to release a new album and take the next step in enhanced collaborative sound creation.
Their repertoire is primarily composed, though the pieces have flexibility to breathe with the moment. At once visceral, muscular, musical, droning, soothing and surprising, Machine Shop takes the incredible sounds of vibrating metal that Stackpole conjures and then amplifies them. Webster captures some of the gong sounds and processes them in real time with subtle effects to be blended in against the sound of the unprocessed gongs. The results are truly unique, both sonically and visually. The live setup with Machine Shop ensures the audience is fully immersed in even the quietest of Stackpole’s gestures, revealing the tremendous sonic spectrum of gongs.
Cheryl Leonard
Cheryl E. Leonard will present a set of music inspired by extreme weather. Featured will be the world premier of Threshold, a music and video piece about an Arctic winter storm created in collaboration with Australian visual artist Genevieve Swifte. Shot in Upernavik, Greenland, Swifte’s video peers out through a window at wind-driven snow and an agitated sea. Leonard’s music merges sounds from amplified natural objects, including stones and driftwood, with Arctic field recordings. Together, sound and image evoke tensions between inner and outer, domestic and wild, the human world and the natural world. Leonard will perform several additional pieces including Frozen Over, a work in which field recordings of lakes flanging, thumping, and cracking in Yosemite National Park are augmented by sounds played live on Japanese bowl gongs and rocks. During the last several exceptionally warm and dry winters it has been possible to access areas of the park that normally can only be reached in summer, including the high-country lakes that Leonard recorded. Typically buried in snow during winter these lakes were bare ice in mid-January 2012. Leonard’s eerie composition reflects on these strange weather patterns, which bode ill for California’s water supply, and herald profound changes in the region’s ecosystems.


Cost: $15/$12

Audio samples in which musicians at this event play: